EIT: And the winners are...

The Climate Change KIC

The Climate KIC aims to create new technologies and new businesses that will reduce Europe’s carbon emissions, for example by improving how cities are designed and operate, and enable individual regions to prepare for changes in temperature, rainfall and landscapes.

The EIT has been asked for €120 million, with the partners planning to contribute up to €750 million over four years, according to Imperial College London, on of the members of the KIC.

Brian Hoskins, Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, one of the key Climate KIC partners said the Climate KIC will enable Europe to adapt and to hugely reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. “Researchers and companies across the world have been working on ways of tackling climate change and lessening the impact that it will have, but it’s impossible for an individual company, university or country to address on its own the huge challenges that we face. The Climate KIC brings together researchers and industry, both large corporates and smaller enterprises, to tackle climate change head-on.”

The Climate KICs’ innovations will be created through four linked programmes. The first of these will focus on cities, which account for more than 70 per cent of all CO2 emissions. Here the Climate KIC will design technologies and introduce new systems that can be integrated across whole cities, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make them more resilient to the effects of climate change.

The second programme will look at the water and land, developing advanced systems to manage water resources and land, using tools and technologies in an integrated way. It will also develop crops and agricultural systems that are resilient to climate change.

The third area focus will be on manufacturing and energy production. It will develop new, zero carbon ways of using sustainable biological resources, for example, a single crop like Poplar tree might be used to manufacture chemicals, materials and liquid fuels together, in a single manufacturing plant, using some of the crop itself to produce the energy needed for the manufacturing process.

Finally, the Climate KIC will develop technology to assess climate change, considering both the emissions causing it and its impacts in terms of extreme climate events. The focus will be on developing information and modelling systems to give an integrated picture.

The research partners in the Climate KIC are Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, the University of Utrecht, a French consortium led by ParisTech and IPSL, and a German grouping led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts and the Technical University of Berlin. The main corporate partners are Bayer, Beluga, Cisco, DSM, EdF, SAP, Schipol Airport, Shell, SolarValley and Thales.

Six regional governments and agencies will be involved, pioneering new approaches to low-carbon living. Companies, institutions and municipalities in each of these areas will give a geographical focus to the Climate KIC’s innovation activities and provide areas where it can test-run new developments and innovations.

The ICT KIC – EIT ICT Labs

EIT ICT Labs, the winning bid for the information and communication technology Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC), aims to transform ICT technologies, research and ideas into products, services and businesses that will boost Europe’s competitiveness in all sectors of society.

To achieve this, EIT ICT Labs has five co-location centres (Berlin, Eindhoven, Helsinki, Paris and Stockholm) where it plans “to build a world-class network of innovation hotspots.” The venture brings together education, research and innovation, with each co-location comprising universities, research centres and companies.

In Berlin, the partners are Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, SAP, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, DFKI and TU Berlin. In Eindhoven, it is Philips, 3TU.NIRICT and TNO. In the Finnish capital, the group is made up of Nokia Research Center, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and Aalto University. The members in Paris are Alcatel-Lucent, France Télécom-Orange, Thomson, INRIA, Université Paris 6, Université Paris-Sud 11 and Institut Télécom. And finally, in Stockholm, the partners are Ericsson, TeliaSonera, SICS and KTH.

The students, researchers and business people will be encouraged to develop a risk-taking and entrepreneurial attitude, identify new business opportunities and create strong ventures.

“A central part of the consortium is to transform research into business concepts, entrepreneurship and growth,” said Gunnar Landgren, vice president at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm and coordinator for EIT ICT Labs. “The creation of a positive view of entrepreneurship during the education itself will be of importance for the provision of skills for Europe’s future.”

Areas where ICT technologies are expected to have an impact include health, individual mobility, social interaction and societal cohesion, efficient energy use, sustainable development and global business development.

Under the education aspect of the KIC, EIT ICT Labs’ aims include developing an entrepreneurship culture in the next generation of students and extending the mobility of young people and teachers across borders. In addition, EIT ICT Labs wants to promote world-class research in ICT science and enable the design of future internet platforms that will impact society at the individual, business and public levels. The KIC’s aims for innovation include boosting ICT as the primary innovation driver in all industry sectors, generating new innovation and business models, and supporting the emergence of strong SMEs that can capitalise on research results.

The Energy KIC – Innoenergy

The Energy KIC, Innoenergy, has the goal of creating a sustainable energy system for Europe by 2050. Made up of 35 partners from business, research institutes and universities, the alliance will be focused in six European co-locations: Barcelona, Eindhoven/Leuven, Grenoble, Karlsruhe, Krakow and Stockholm. Each centre will coordinate one energy topic each for all partners in the consortium.

The German co-location – made up of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the University of Stuttgart and the enterprises SAP and EnBW – will focus on chemical energy carriers, such as hydrogen, alcohols or other hydrocarbons that are produced, for example, by the upgrading of biomass with the help of sustainable primary energies. Such chemical energy carriers are characterized by universal applicability as well as high energy density and share the advantage of smooth integration into existing infrastructures, e.g. gas stations and pipelines, according to KIT.

The Swedish group, whose members include KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Uppsala University, ABB and Vattenfall, will be responsible for the areas of smart electricity networks and electrical energy storage. KTH and Uppsala University will build an innovation centre specialising in environmental technology and sustainable energy solutions with activities at both university campuses.

“The centre will be one of several exciting meeting places which will provide connections between industry, research and education, and which will be expected to lead to a new spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity,” said Ramon Wyss, vice President of KTH and a coordinator for Innoenergy. “The centre will become a combination of a laboratory environment, a learning environment and a business development unit.”

Other partners in the consortium include Total, ABB (Energy and Automation Technology), EDF (Électricité de France SA), CEA (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, France), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Barcelona business school ESADE.

The idea is that commercialisation will happen faster through a close networking of the Innoenergy partners.